My name is Fernando Amat and I am a bioinformatics research specialist at HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus. I work with Dr. Philipp Keller developing new statistical image processing and learning algorithms based on probabilistic models to tackle large-scale problems in biology. My main focus at Janelia is the in toto analysis of embryogenic development of complex organisms, such as zebrafish, Drosophila and mouse. Dr. Keller has developed state-of-the-art light-sheet based microscopes that allow to record the movement and division of every cell during embryogenesis for different organisms.

With the development of new imaging technologies and the adoption of digital systems for data acquisition, the amount of data collected in a single experiment can be in the realm of terabytes. Moreover, many experiments required long acquisition periods in order to capture all the necessary information to answer developmental or behavioral biological questions. My goal is to develop new algorithms to process all this data efficiently and with minimum human interaction, in order to transform microscopy images into specific knowledge and to expand the set of scientific questions that can be answered.